As explained below, the invention is applicable to a wide variety of components, including not only those which are made of substrates of group IV materials (essentially silicon), but also those made on the basis of III-V (GaAs, InP, etc.) materials or on the basis of II-VI materials.
The method provides for detaching and recovering the substrate on which the components are made.
Proposals have already been made to make electronic components and then separate them from their substrates. That technique has already been proposed, in particular for Schottky diodes or for MESFETs on a GaAs or an InP substrate, with separation being obtained by chemically dissolving a layer of Al.sub.x Ga.sub.1-x As having a high aluminum content (molar fraction x.sub.Al &lt;0.50) previously grown epitaxially between the substrate and the active layers of semiconductor material constituting the electronic components proper. In this respect, reference may be made to M. Konagai et al., High efficiency GaAs thin film solar cells by peeled film technology, Journal of Crystal Growth, No. 45 (1978), p. 277, E. Yablonovitch et al., Extreme selectivity in the lift-off of epitaxial GaAs films, Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 51, no. 26, 28 Dec. 1987, p. 222, or H. Schumacher et al., High speed InP/GaInAs photodiode on sapphire substrate, Electronics Letters, Vol. 25, No. 24, 23 Nov. 1989, p. 1653.
Nevertheless, that technique is limited to the special cases of components on a substrate of GaAs or of InP, and because of the special characteristics of the soluble separating layer, it cannot be transposed directly to components other than Schottky diodes or MESFETs on GaAs or InP substrates.